Michael; What you say all sounds so good. But correspondence by analogy is not causality. The vicious circle of the one-good-true-beautiful is ultimately meaningless because each term is used as the definition of the other. Further, it's specious to claim that the recent experiments in particle physics 'prove' that tautologous slogan. Whatever Conrad or anyone else thinks of his or her reality can't prove another reality. When we think about it, to say "to provide a clearer view of reality" is just a confusing jumble of words, as tautologous as one-good-true-beautiful.
Personally, I'm for cleaning the slate of all those 19C romantic slogans about art, reality, self-expression, and the like. None of them stand up to scrutiny. As for the clarity of Clear. Why not go to scholasticism and deal with Thomastic notion of light. Thomas believed light emanated from objects and was not reflected from them. It was stimulated by God's grace. That changes the sense of 'clear' rooting it in things so that the more clear something is the more light it produces and the more real it is and the more grace it exemplifies. Seeing was the ability to produce light. Having a clearer view, a more en-lightened view, a better view meant have more grace. If grace was God's gift, then having it to attain better clarity in seeing was also to have more truth (God's truth) and thus more beauty as well. Or something like that. The main idea is that light was produced by objects as a result of God's grace. Seeing reality more clearly meant being more aware of God's grace and His reality as truth, goodness, etc. It was not primarily about seeing the trees and leaves (or particles). Even Leonardo had trouble with light as reflective instead of eminating from the eye (see his work with the cone of vision). wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, August 1, 2012 6:13:57 AM Subject: Re: b My task is, above all, to make you see.b On Aug 1, 2012, at 6:42 AM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: > Did Joseph Conrad (author of "Heart of Darkness") probably mean that an > artist's creation should provide a clearer view of reality? "Should provide"? How about just "gives"? I'm not aware of any WoA that was intentionally devised to hide, obscure, becloud, or confuse a view of reality, including notoriously "difficult" examples like "Finnegan's Wake" or "At Swim Two Birds" and similar books. The same in other fields (Cage, Rauschenberg, Glass). They are attempts by the author to use another mode to present or represent ... something. Surrealism, with its intentional dislocations, odd combination, distortions, and other confusions, was developed to reveal the reality above the reality we see (sur realisme). In its own way, it was a kind of Neoplatonism, an attempt to look through that which is presented to our senses to another, better, more true reality. Your question implies a moral or ethical dimension that encompasses the work or artist, or both. "Should provide" and "clearer." Why should? Why clearer? When scientists attempt to validate a hypothesis, such as finding the Higgs boson and thus certifying one of the final aspects of the Grand Unified Field theory, it most certainly is not "clearer" to all but a small handfull of knowledgeable people. "Should" it be "clearer"? Or should it be true? The Scholastics were smart cookies. In their philosophy, the One, Good, True, and Beautiful were co-manifestations of each other. The One was True and Good and Beautiful, as the Beautiful was True, and the Good was One, etc. So when the scientists prove the existence of the Higgs boson, they will have come closer to demonstrating the unity of the GUF theory, which is, by definition, One, and it will be Beautiful (even though it is complicated), and True and Good. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
